


Unexpected Survival: an Out of Cryo story

by Quantum_Reality



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Angst and Feels, F/F, Unrequited Crush, out of cryo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 08:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11505759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quantum_Reality/pseuds/Quantum_Reality
Summary: Rebecca "Becks" Johnson had a good friend named Jenna Carter, and as the world ended, Becks was fortunate enough to be placed in cryogenic suspension. However, she thought Jenna to not be so lucky. What happened to Jenna as the world ended?(Don't read this unless you've read Out of Cryo by Kitewalker first)





	Unexpected Survival: an Out of Cryo story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kitewalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kitewalker/gifts).



> This work is set in the "Out of Cryo" fanfiction 'verse created by **Kitewalker** , who has graciously allowed me to write this story expanding on hints given in "Out of Cryo" as to how Jenna survived past the end of the world.
> 
> Any omissions or errors, however, are purely my own.

“One sec. Mom’s calling me, Becks!”

Even as Jenna Carter automatically turned to hear her mother’s voice, she could hear the Focus connection dissolve into useless static, then silence as the connection ended.

 _Shit_.

Jenna slumped on her bed for a moment and rested her head in her hands. There was only one reason her mother would be calling her. Her mom would have The Syringe prepared and she’d… she’d just _die_. It was supposed to be totally painless—

“ _Jenna! Now!_ ”

Jenna sniffled, then swallowed past the sudden lump in her throat. She stood up and grabbed a tissue from the box on her dresser as she began walking down the hallway to the family room. As she wiped the tears away from her eyes, she passed the dining area and entered the spacious square lounge room. Her mother and father sat on the couch near the coffee table.

_Wait a second…_

“Why are there only two syringes?” blurted Jenna. “And what are _they_ doing here?” She pointed at the two men in black combat gear standing off near the exit to the foyer.

Her mother looked wan and tired. “Honey, you should know this is the best thing for you. You won’t have to die.”

Jenna stood, dumbstruck. “What?” she whispered.

“Just, please, go with these people,” her dad said, his voice soft and soothing. “They’ll take you to an education facility, where young people like you will help after the end. Ted saw to that.”

The soldiers strode up to Jenna. One barked, “Ma’am, we need to remove you from these premises now before the swarm gets any closer.”

Jenna gasped, “What the _fuck_?! Mom, Dad! Why aren’t you coming with—” Hands landed on her shoulders. She howled, “Hey, get your hands off me!”

She was now being dragged towards the front door. She kicked out futilely as her parents’ faces blurred into unrecognizable blobs. She blubbered, “Mom – Dad – _please!_ ”

The bag went over her head as she was inexorably dragged to the front door, and after a renewed frenzy of howling and struggling, pressure against her neck and a soft _hiss_ heralded her crash into unconsciousness.

* * *

A loud thumping sound and a jarring sensation shook Jenna awake. She could feel a rebreather mask fastened over her face, as well. The bag, however, was still on her head.

She was shortly picked up, feet and shoulders, and carried out of a vehicle. Someone yanked the bag off her head and saw her groggily blinking at the sudden influx of light, because they said, “Ma’am, we’ll have to sedate you again if you try to resist or run away. We’re under orders not to let the swarm take you, so just nod if you understand. If not, I’ll re-sedate you.”

Jenna weakly shook her head _yes_ ; she could just see a black object through her bleary vision, and it was there she was being carried. The timbre of the man’s voice grew softer as he said, “We’ll set you down inside a fast hovercar. At that point you can have some water.” She heard a sigh and turned to try and see his face. She thought it might be the guy on the right who was helping convey her to the car. He went on to say, “If it helps, I never like having to take you kids away from your parents. They just want your survival, you understand.”

Jenna mumbled, “Then why can’t _they_ come too?” She heard her voice a bit tinnily through the rebreather speaker.

“I’m sorry; my orders don’t include that information. Watch your head, now.”

Jenna was set rather gently on her feet, then guided into a comfortable seat in the hovercar. She blinked owlishly as the door closed, with dim light now suffusing the interior. She could move her arms, albeit slowly, and found she could close her hands into fists. The door on the other side opened, and she could feel the car shift a bit as the soldier got in beside her. A water bottle was duly procured and set in the small holder nook in the passenger side door, and the soldier helped get her rebreather mask off. He said, “Unlike the helicopter we took you in, the air’s conditioned in here - safe to breathe, fully recycled. Have your water. You’ll need it.”

Jenna glumly took the bottle and began drinking, savoring the almost ice-coldness of probably the last pure water she’d ever have.

“How much’d this bottle cost?” she wondered as the hovercar smoothly rose into the air and began accelerating.

The soldier - who she could see, now that her vision was improving, looked to be a man in his early thirties - let out a short and probably very nonregulation snort before returning to impassivity. “The budget for this project was approved at the highest level, I’m told. No expense spared. You’re one of the lucky ones.”

“Where are you ta—” Jenna stopped when she saw the man raise his hand abruptly.

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I’m simply not able to answer your questions about where you’re headed. My orders are to have you conveyed to a classified location, and then I’ve got to get back to USRC. General Herres wants all hands on deck for the final push for Enduring Victory.”

A chill went up Jenna’s spine. “You mean, they might actually win? I’ve heard the rumors, something about a ‘Zero Dawn’?”

“I know as much as you do. Honestly, in any other circumstance I would be handing you a weapon, giving you a five-minute crash course in its usage, and posting you on guard duty at USRC. But orders are orders.”

Jenna fell silent and slumped back into her seat. Soon after, the hovercar streaked down out of the low-hanging fog and landed near a tall, grey, rather nondescript building. She was escorted inside by the soldier, whose nametag she could now read in the bright lights of the building’s interior. “I’m sorry I lost control, you know, uh, Captain Terence?”

Terence shook his head. “Anyone your age can’t be expected to react that well. I’ve seen everything from stone mute silence to actual fainting when I have to do these escort missions. Your reaction is actually encouraging: you’re a fighter, and we’ll need people like you in the time to come.” He looked at his watch, then reached behind him for his rebreather. “Ma’am, there’ll be people here shortly. I have to go. Good day - as much as can be expected in times like these.”

Jenna nodded, dredging up a smile from somewhere as she watched the soldier strap on his rebreather and step towards the exit to the parking lot.

The white-smocked nurses muttered soothingly at Jenna as she was escorted past a set of blastproof doors marked SWARM-PROOF AT 1 MM, but all they could really tell her was that she was part of an important project, and that she would need to be in cryo-suspension for a little while.

“Wait!” she barked, digging her feet in to stop from being subtly escorted towards the open tall human-sized tube. There was only one reason they’d want to stuff her in such a tube; she could freak out over actual honest to god working cryogenic suspension later. Right now, she wanted answers. “How long am I gonna be in there, exactly? Why do you need to freeze me? Don’t you need me alive while there’s still a war to fight?”

The nurses shook their heads sadly. The slightly less agitated one said, “It’s too far gone now; the best we can do is this. And it’ll be like no time has passed, honestly. Someone will come fetch you and explain things, what you’ll do to help the education facility later on.”

Jenna sighed and looked at the cryotube. She could try to make a break for it, but - no. She would likely get caught and shoved in at gunpoint, if needed. And if they had to sedate her to put her in, who knew if that might kill her when they tried to wake her up?

_And maybe, just maybe, I’ll get to see Becks again._

That thought lifted her a bit, put a small smile on her face, as she nodded to the nurses. “Okay. Tell me how I do this.”

After all was said and done, Jenna rested her back against the padded wall of the cryotube. As the tube cover clicked shut, she looked out through the clear window, feeling the slight poking of a syringe in her arm as she did so. A chill went through her as the white cloudy cryogas began enveloping her. Jenna called out in her mind, _Becks, I’m sorry - I never told you I love you..._

* * *

A hiss and click sounded in Jenna’s ears as a pleasantly modulated female voice announced, “ _Cryogenic suspension recovery complete. Subject: Jenna Carter._ ”

Soft indirect light hit Jenna’s eyes as she blinked, squinting her eyes as she tried to focus. It was definitely dimmer than just a few minutes ago. She guessed the facility must be on the night cycle right now. She breathed slowly and heavily as she leaned forward a bit past the open cryomodule door. She rasped, “Hello?”

Her voice softly echoed up and down the hallway.

Nobody came.

Jenna stepped out of the cryotube and automatically put her hand to her head to key on her Focus. Momentary panic went through her as she realized it wasn’t there; then she remembered she’d been told to slide her Focus into the special receptacle beside her cryotube, and after a moment of fumbling at the catch to open the cover, she got her Focus out of the receptacle and set it on the right side of her face.

Jenna ran her hand through her hair, feeling the dried-out cryogas remnants flaking off as she did so. She looked down at her clothes and saw small flakes all over her shirt and pants. She brushed them off as well, and thought, _ugh, I need a shower_.

But more importantly—

She queried her Focus for a status update, wondering again why no-one had come and gotten her. As soon as Jenna started reading the status messages, she abruptly stood stock-still as though bolted to the floor.

**NO NEW MESSAGES - UNABLE TO QUERY WORLD COMNET**  
**EXCESSIVE TIME ELAPSED SINCE LAST NTP SYNCHRONIZATION - ESTIMATED DISCREPANCY IS 2 MINUTES 7 SECONDS**  
**CURRENT DATE/TIME: 3030-SE-01 06:00**

“T-that can’t be right,” Jenna whimpered. “Thirty-thirty? A _thousand years_?”

 _No. No! Nononononono_. It wasn’t possible! When she’d gone into cryo, it was February 2066!

Yet when she looked again up and down the hallway, she noticed the radio-fluorescent night lights were even dimmer than they _should_ be. The only thing that could do that, she knew, had to be the radioactive decay of the alpha source in the tube, weakening the power of the light the tubes could provide.

There was also the fine covering of dust over all the tubes - even hers. In fact, when Jenna peered at the storage receptacle for her Focus, she could see where her fingers and hands had brushed away some of the dust, leaving streaks.

 _Maybe she could wake one of the others up_.

She rushed to the cryotube opposite hers, frantically searching for a status display. Jenna engaged her Focus, hoping it could pick up a signal to interface with.

No response.

The display monitor was dead. No amount of tapping the screen or pushing any of the buttons could wake it back to life.

Jenna reached out then stopped, her shaky hand hovering over the dusty tube’s reinforced plastiglass. _What if…_?

She gulped.

 _No. I’ve gotta know the truth_.

She brought her hand down, brushing away the centuries of dust, and only daring short glances at where their face would be as she did so.

Even so, Jenna’s eyes fastened on what was inside the chamber, and she gasped, stumbling backwards. She tried willing her heaving breaths and thundering heart to slow down, clamping her eyes shut to the horror she had briefly witnessed.

_No-one should ever have to see a dead body._

Jenna shuddered. She looked around at the other cryotubes. Her shoulders slumped. She couldn’t bring herself to try and look at another tube, and in any case, aside from hers, none of the others had any active status displays.

_What had happened?_

_Why had she been the one spared?_

In all honesty, Jenna might never know, but she could hazard a guess (although Becks would probably be better at hacking the actual system to fetch the status logs): there might have been a transient power failure, and of the thirty or so people hidden away in the room, she was the only one who’d been lucky enough to escape the consequences of that. Maybe it was because she was the last one in, or something.

The shadow of death loomed over the hall; her spine tingling unpleasantly, Jenna knew if she stayed, she’d be next—

_She needed to get the hell out of there. Now._

Jenna ran for the doors at the end of the hall and yanked on the handles. When they wouldn’t budge, she kicked at the door and swore. “Let me out of here, damn it!”

In desperation, she slapped her hand on the access panel on the right side, and her jaw dropped in disbelief as the scanner went green and displayed, EXIT PROTOCOL ACTIVE.

Jenna recalled, now, they’d asked her to authenticate her handprint before going into cryo. _Someone must’ve programmed in a contingency in case something happened_ , she decided.

Not daring to question her stroke of luck as the doors unlatched and smoothly swung back, she dashed through, retracing her steps down the hallways and up a flight of stairs as her footfalls echoed up and down the nearly pitch-dark, deserted halls heading back to the blast doors. It seemed, here, the radio-fluorescents must’ve been the cheaper kind with a weaker alpha source, and they had nearly exhausted their usable energy.

Finally, she was at the blast doors, her Focus just making out the symbol painted onto them. It processed the symbol and displayed in purple print BLAST DOOR: SWARMPROOF SECURE AT 1 MM.

There was no way, no _fucking_ way, she was going to wrestle those doors open by hand. _That access plate at the side,_ she thought mulishly, _had better goddamn well work._

As soon as she slapped her hand on the slick black panel, her heart sank.

No beep.

No comforting green light.

Jenna let her hand fall and moved to the center of the hallway, staring at the god freaking damned doors blocking her so tantalizingly-close exit.

She would not sniffle.

She would _not_ sniffle, damnit.

_Oh, who was she kidding?_

She bowed her head and allowed herself one loud, pitiful sniffle before lifting her head again and kicking her Focus into enhanced-sight mode. It wasn’t the extra super deluxe stuff the cops and military got, but she could still use it to do all the standard electric circuit probes, do short range probing through walls, do low-intensity photon enhancement, and so on.

Sure enough, in the false color now overlaid on her ordinary vision, she could see, on her left, a large wheel set into the wall at about chest height (well, Jenna allowed, chest height for _her_ as opposed to a much taller and beefier male solder).

Her Focus also showed, in the wall leading to the doors, the mechanical linkages that would allow her to hand crank the doors open; it was just a matter of effort. She went to the wheel, disengaged her focus, grabbed the handle and set her jaw. She _would_ get those doors open!

With all her heaving and straining, she was just barely able to get the doors to start their dreadfully slow, groaning slide apart from one another. The crack of light shining through the middle barely got brighter with each turn of the wheel, but even just knowing there was natural light on the other side lifted her spirits.

Swarm or no swarm, she _would_ get the hell out of that creepy mausoleum.

Millimeter by millimeter, turn by turn, the doors creaked further and further apart.

But even that run of good luck was too much to last; the wheel finally seized up for good and would turn no more, leaving the doors shuddering to a halt about a half-meter apart. Jenna tried using her Focus to see what was wrong, but couldn’t isolate a cause. Best case, she decided, one of the doors had just gotten stuck on the tracks because a rat had gotten in and pooped on the rail or something.

But the problem at hand...

Jenna wasn’t a really big person, but even so, she thought, when you’re a just a little under 170 centimeters and fifty or fifty-five kilos, you can only squeeze past something so small. She took a deep breath, exhaled, then stretched her arms and legs like she remembered Becks doing before her races at school.

After a few minutes, Jenna decided she was as limber as she was going to ever be, and damned if she’d let a multi-tonne, nearly two-meter-thick blast door defeat her. She carefully moved sideways, bracing her back against one door, and feeling her boobs just brush against the other door.

Sardonically, Jenna thought Becks would’ve had a slightly easier fit. (Not that she’d ever had objections to the way Becks could fill out a cocktail dress, though.)

But she could make it!

 _Just,_ Jenna reminded herself, _do not panic._

She shifted to her left, slowly, cautiously, trying not to think of what might happen if somehow the power came back on and some Swarm failsafe kicked in.

Luckily, the edges of each door had been machined to exactingly smooth tolerances, and her clothes brushed against them without trouble. The seal had held back the centuries of dust in that regard, at least.

A tense few minutes later, Jenna was past the doors! She stepped to the side, then leaned her back against the very door that had nearly enclosed her forever, and let out a long, low sigh, feeling the tension drain from her body. She then went down the short antechamber hallway, yanked open the ordinary door (it wasn’t even electronically secured; it was just a decorative glass door), and stepped into the glass-enclosed front office area.

The front office had clearly not escaped the ravages of age. Several panes of glass had shattered, whether from the elements or from people she didn’t know. There were creepers of moss slowly growing along parts of the floor, but Jenna looked up, out, past the glass—

All that faded away as she saw the gorgeous, blue, _blue_ sky.

And the air! She took a deep breath, taking in the fresh, unrecycled air, untainted by the choking, toxic chemicals the swarms gave off as they chewed through all the biomatter on Earth.

Whatever had happened— Zero Dawn, Enduring Victory, she had no idea, but it didn’t matter.

_The Earth had survived!_

And now, finally, Jenna _did_ allow herself to give in to the sniffles and tears she’d been holding back.

She was alive, a thousand years old on a new Earth, the accidental inheritor of all the work of billions of people to hold back the Faro Plague.

But she had no-one.

Mom—Dad—

They hadn’t had to use those goddamned syringes to escape the Faro Plague! She could kick herself for not forcing that soldier, somehow, she didn’t know, but she maybe could’ve made him bring them, made the nurses find two more tubes somewhere…

Her shoulders slumped. It was useless to want what couldn’t have happened.

Then her mind turned to the girl she’d known for almost all her life; her Focus brought up that stupid, funny as hell selfie they’d both taken at the Sunblast, and it brought a fleeting grin to her face as she saw the image of Becks smiling as she, Jenna, planted a kiss on her friend’s cheek.

Her spirits dropped again as she gulped, letting out a sob as she imagined Becks in a cryotube just like hers, suffocating and _dying_ because of a _fucking_ power failure.

_Oh, god, Becks, if only I could’ve…_

She slumped again. It was too fucking late. If a state-of-the-art facility probably bankrolled by the US government or Ted Faro could only keep one person out of like thirty alive, what the hell chance had Becks had in a home-brew cryo-facility?

Jenna stumbled forward, trying to carefully step over the shattered glass around the front doors. She walked past, through the grass-covered parking lot, over the short rise, and she stopped, gasping—

The sun was midway up in the sky now, and the verdant green hills and thickly-treed valleys gave way to a rich brown-red desert at the horizon.

The new Earth was truly beautiful, a marvel to behold.

Jenna bit her lip and wiped her eyes. Unfortunately, she was truly alone and knew no-one else who she could share this planet with.

Her stomach growled; she was hungry, and she needed to eat.

She strode off towards the first large thicket of trees, hoping to find some berries she could eat.

* * *

As the months and years passed, Jenna received shock after shock as she slowly, unwillingly assimilated into the milieu of the strange, foreign Earth she inhabited.

Machines that wandered the Earth, growing steadily more hostile to humans each passing year.

Humans with almost no technology, no knowledge that they came from _her_ world, even though they spoke _her_ language almost unchanged over the centuries.

The people - they called themselves Carja, or Oseram (these mostly seemed to be servants to well-dressed Carjans), and they eyed her with suspicion when she tried to explain where she’d come from. In the end, telling them she was of the “Banuk” seemed to allay suspicion the most; people from that insular tribe rarely left their lands, and were said to have an unusual affinity for the machines (which explained away Jenna’s ramblings about technology).

And the first brown-haired girl she’d seen about her own age—

 _Oh, god_. Jenna could still remember the sinking pit of despair in her gut when she had blurted “Becks!” and the beautiful girl had turned around, puzzlement on her face. It had taken every effort to run and hide behind a building before she wailed out her agonized grief, curling up and resting her head in her arms as she did so.

But even so, the confused girl had found her, introduced herself as Rayna. She had taken pity on Jenna, brought her into her simple home in the village. And Jenna had been too weak not to let the girl take her to bed, drinking in her kisses and closing her eyes, pretending just for a little while that it was another brown-haired girl making love to her.

Rayna hadn’t even been upset when, at the height of Jenna’s ecstasy, she’d called out Becks’s name.

But try as Jenna might, she just _couldn’t_ make herself fit in anywhere.

At all.

Rayna had offered her company any time she returned; had warned her about the border zones where Carja raids happened.

But it wasn’t _home_. It wasn’t fucking Colorado and dance clubs and university and computers and _(don’t say her name or you’ll cry again, damnit)_.

And so Jenna found herself wandering the breadths of Carja before going north into the mountains, her body and mind long-hardened from the daily fight that marked her existence on this new Earth.

And it was this new Jenna, driven half-mad from just _existing_ in a world that had no place for her, that Ted Faro found one day in his own explorations and brought to his side, giving her a small sliver of the Earth that was.


End file.
